Lead nurturing has huge potential. According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing can generate 50% more ready to buy leads at a 33% lower cost per lead.
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is delivering relevant information at the right time, making leads choose your business when they are ready, with the goal of building a long-term relationship.
With this process, you ensure that you follow up with leads – individuals who are interested in your product or service – until they proceed to purchase. You keep them “stuck” in the customer journey by providing information and inspiration that fits the lead’s decision process. You finalize the customers journey.
Lead generation is not lead nurturing
Lead nurturing and lead generation are often confused with each other, but there is a distinct difference. Lead generation is the process of identifying potential customers and generating their interest in an organization’s products or services. It’s about bringing in leads. In that process, you want to gather as much information as possible about this lead. If we look at the marketing funnel, lead generation is in the top of the funnel. It’s also called “top of funnel” (tofu).
Lead nurturing is the automated process which monitors and supports the lead to help make decisions. The goal is to convert the lead into a long-term customer. You do this by getting to know the lead and building trust with the help of (automated) provision of relevant content. This is how you build a long-term customer relationship.
Lead nurturing is in the middle of funnel (mofu) and bottom of funnel (bofu), converting a lead to a customer.
Don’t stop after collecting email addresses
We often see campaigns stop when an email address is collected. It is then forgotten that those contacts are not doing anything yet. They have only expressed interest and are waiting to see it fulfilled. If you don’t actively retain these interested parties and follow up with them, it’s a waste of your previous investment in the lead.
Compare it to heating a house; you put a huge amount of energy (and therefore money) into heating it, and then someone opens a window for fresh air which slowly cools it down again. The heat slowly escapes and eventually it’s cold again.
This also happens to your lead. If you forget to warm up your leads (nurturing), they will eventually lose interest again. Ultimately, of course, you want to convert your lead to a customer. Lead nurturing will help you do this.
How does lead nurturing work?
You provide a lead with information that supports making a decision in the customer journey, the process a (potential) customer goes through when making a purchase. Lead nurturing is mostly an automated process and often you do this with informative content rather than direct sales. In particular, the first lead nurturing email you send your lead is an informational one. An example is an article about a product or service your prospect is interested in:
You get a lead in via a download of your free ebook “10 tips for a vegetarian menu. Then you send this lead an informative blog about the items you can use in the dishes. You support the lead with relevant information for what is on his mind at that moment and what helps him in making a decision. By being relevant to your lead, you hope to achieve conversion from lead to customer.
Lead nurturing: behind the scenes
Lead nurturing is often referred to as the core of marketing automation. Marketing automation is an automated marketing tactic for targeted and structured communication with your target audience.
With lead nurturing, you want to get to know your customer better. By applying lead nurturing you collect more and more data and get a better picture of who the person is behind the email address. Often the process starts with the fact that you have received an email address that is filled out on a form. You just don’t know anything about this person besides this email address, which makes it difficult to send relevant information.
Step 1) unlock profile by collecting data
You start by showing content you think the lead is interested in. You do this in a targeted way by setting up the back end with “Tagging.” You can do this based on profile data (e.g. the segment), or by the behavior of the profile (which landing page viewed, what was clicked on, forms filled out, etc.).
STEP 2) QUALIFY
You ultimately want to qualify the lead and determine the potential by looking at the match with your company. You do this with the LEAD QUALIFICATION PROCESS.
Important is to form a common understanding internally what you mean by different types of leads and how you want to follow up different leads; by mail, by phone, in person. On what basis do you do this, from what data? What does a potential customer of your company need to meet; the amount of turnover? The number of meals? Number of employees? Location? Segment? You name it.
The more data you have, the better you can use algorithms to estimate what information is relevant to the person.
STEP 3) AUTOMATED FOLLOW UPS
Based on the lead’s behavior, you set up automated follow ups. These are automated follow-ups that are triggered by the person’s behavior. You do this with an automated email flow. With a marketing automation system such as Infusionsoft, Hubspot and Salesforce, you build workflows that send out follow-up emails based on triggers.
An example: A lead has expressed interest in a trial package of one of your products. In the thank you email, you’ve already added a recipe for inspiration. Depending on whether your lead clicked on the recipe or not, they will receive another follow-up email. If they clicked, you give more inspiration like this recipe. If they didn’t click, you offer it again in a different way.
This is a short example, you can probably imagine that these workflows can be made to infinity. Do you want the second email to not be sent out immediately? Then you set a delay. And are you afraid that the email will be delayed at an unfavorable time and your email will not be opened? You can set workflows by times and time zones. You can find more examples of lead nurture campaigns in our next article “Lead Nurturing: 7 Campaigns You Must Try.”
A Harvard study shows that you are 7 times more likely to have a successful conversation with a decision maker if you follow up with your leads within the hour.
How do you make lead nurturing a success with your company?
Collaboration systems sales, marketing and service
The key success factor is cooperation through systems between marketing, sales and service. This prevents loss of (potential) customers in your lead nurturing process. And not just in lead nurturing, think of all the other campaigns you work on together. Without good collaboration, the customer journey does not connect well from one stage to the next.
An example: Marketing sends inspirational, themed content to a certain target audience. Now how does the customer get one step ahead? It can be done by offering them the opportunity to make an appointment with sales. Or by making a trial order for a product. Or having a phone conversation with customer service.
If the steps in the customer journey don’t align well, the final result will be much less. You can avoid that by working with customer journey mapping.
Working with systems requires a different way of thinking. Because everything is recorded in systems, you can follow your lead from entry to customer.
The right systems
Driving relevant information in an automated way is done with the right systems. When we talk about systems, we mean the Content Management System (CMS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and marketing automation. These 3 systems must work well together to do the right lead nurturing.
Through the CMS, you manage your content and get your potential customer to develop into a lead. For example, place relevant downloadable white papers on your website to generate leads.
With marketing automation, you automate your lead nurturing process. For example, you build an automatic email workflow in which your leads, based on their behavior, receive the right content at the right time.
Through your CRM system, you monitor everything about how your leads are behaving. With a well-designed CRM system, you can use ‘tags’ to send relevant content at the right time. So it is important that your CRM system is properly populated. To apply lead nurturing successfully it is therefore very important that marketing, sales and service work well together. After all, working
Where to start
Okay, you want to apply lead nurturing and now know roughly what it means. Of course you want to be as successful as possible. But where to start?
We’ve created a checklist to help you build a successful lead nurturing campaign.
- Set a goal
- Segment your database
- Use your buyer personas
- Check the conversion paths
- Choose a target audience
- Create the content
- Select campaign duration and number of messages
- Design an informational funnel
- Draw a communication flowchart
- Prepare mails
Want all the steps of the checklist + even more relevant information on how to create a successful lead nurturing campaign? Then download the checklist below and start lead nurturing today!